


Pillow Talk

by aphelion_orion



Category: Guilty Gear
Genre: Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-10 17:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphelion_orion/pseuds/aphelion_orion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Silly arguments Ky never thought he'd have about sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Why two Kys are better than one

"You know, the only way this could be hotter is if there were two of you."

There was nothing quite as derailing, Ky felt, as a Sol who was trying to be perverted and complimentary at the same time. This was mainly because Sol could be counted on to be odd or outrageous (or outrageously odd) at all times, but he rarely bothered with anything approaching praise that couldn't be expressed in a string of swears. So to hear that phrase breathed into his ear while he was busy determining whether he could set a new record for getting rid of their combined buckles sent his brain to a screeching halt.

Ky hesitated, squinted, and decided to abandon Sol's belt in favor of processing the statement. Beneath him, Sol cracked an eye open and questioningly slid both hands up his thighs, the beginnings of a "You-better-not-have-remembered-any-emergency-paperwork" frown forming at the corners of his mouth the longer the inactivity lasted.

"...two of me?" Ky asked eventually, having turned the sentence over several times but still not finding anything remotely logical or sensible about it.

The hands trailing up to his waistband stilled, Sol apparently not prepared for mid-foreplay conversation. "Huh?"

"Why would there be two of me?"

"It's a figure of speech," Sol said, giving him a look that made it clear he had distinctly not meant for this to be examined in greater detail at this point in time.

Shaking his head, Ky sat back more firmly on his midsection, which prompted a strangled noise. "I've never heard of this 'figure of speech.' And anyway, how would there being two of me affect this situation?"

"I'd be out of my clothes faster, for one," Sol grumbled, and rolled his eyes at Ky's pointed glare. "Please tell me you're not asking me for an introduction to twincest."

"Twin- _what_?"

Apparently realizing that the festivities wouldn't proceed until he had puzzled this one out, Sol sighed and propped himself up on his elbows the best he could. "See, it's like... you have one thing you think is hot."

Deeming this the first conclusive statement he'd heard in a while, Ky nodded.

"So the only way it could be even _better_ is if it were two."

And it figured that things would immediately stop making sense. Ky wrinkled his nose.

"And then they make out with you. And each other." Sol paused, smirking at something only he could see. "Especially each other."

"Why would I want to make out with myself," Ky said, annoyance beginning to creep into his tone. He had overheard his fair share of campfire conversations, of course, but among all the who-is-doing-what-to-whom, the subject of fantasizing about a replica of one's partner had never cropped up. If this kind of thing was considered normal...

Sol, meanwhile, was building up some annoyance of his own. "It's porn, Kiske. Stop overanalyzing it. Sometimes people just think about crap to spice things up."

"So it is to make things more interesting?"

"Yeah, now you got—"

"Does this mean you consider this arrangement unsatisfactory?"

"Wha— _no_."

"But you said—"

"Look." Sol drew a deep breath, dragged his hands to the front of Ky's shirt, and started tugging it from his pants. "It's like... cake."

Ky tilted his head. His brain, ever determined to parse the somewhat far-fetched comparison, conjured up a nice three-tiered chocolate cake.

"You like the cake. You wouldn't enjoy that cake any less if there were more cake, but that doesn't mean more cake is a bad thing."

Ky tilted his head to the other side as his brain helpfully imagined another cake of the same variety.

Pulling the shirt free, Sol began hunting for its zipper. "See? You can't look at this from my perspective. You have to look at it from yours."

The two cakes spontaneously morphed into two Sols, and Ky scrunched up his face.

The real Sol paused in struggling with the zipper, and grinned. "...you're thinking about it, aren't you."

Ky blinked. Mentally, the two Sols blinked back, equally nonplussed.

"...what are they doing."

In his mind, the camp was now on fire, and the two Sols were high-fiving each other before a scene of burning mayhem.

"...If there were two of you, I'd get a giant headache," Ky concluded, and swiftly bent down to muffle Sol's answering snerk.


	2. Arguing semantics in closet spaces

In retrospect, he shouldn't have asked. It was rare that anything good ever came of asking, since, depending on the mood, Sol's answers were either stoic silence, a strange pun only he understood, or something that should have made sense in theory because the grammar was right and all the words were in a language spoken on Earth, but the statement contained therein was completely demented.

In this case, he only had himself to blame for interrupting what had been shaping up to be the first high point in several weeks — the space might have been cramped, and the bench was certainly too short, and if he moved too far to one side or the other, he was liable to bump his head on the wall carvings, but privacy was hard to come by and it wasn't like they hadn't made do with worse in the past. Most logistics problems could be resolved by paying attention to where knees and elbows were going, and by leaving the removing of obstacles to Sol, as he seemed to derive an inordinate amount of satisfaction from divesting them both of buckles, and generally had more specific ideas for how he wanted these encounters to go.

Ky freely admitted that he was quite unimaginative where sex was concerned, since mostly anything below "rest" and "warmth" was optional at best and unthinkable at worst, and a good deal of the things normal people appeared to find arousing simply tended to leave him confused. Not having to be in charge was nice, and he was wholly content with focusing on the grabbing and the snogging parts of the exercise, but that was usually as far as it went. In this case, he might have been rather too intent on the grabbing and snogging, because it took him a moment to realize that Sol was not going where he wanted him to go, and had, in fact, ceased moving entirely.

Squinting, Ky tried to pull himself a bit more upright to take stock of the situation, which proved to be somewhat difficult since he had one leg hooked over Sol's shoulder and was mostly staying where he was by clutching the edge of the too-short bench. Sol had stopped in the general vicinity of his navel, breath tickling Ky's skin, one hand still firmly grasping his hip, the other hooked in the hem of his pants. With the mess of hair in the way, it was hard to gauge the reason, but once Sol got going, the only things that could actually make him pause this long were concerns over bruised ribs or an impending Gear attack.

Shoving away the incredibly childish voice that did not _want_ this to be a Gear attack, couldn't the Gear attack wait for _five bloody minutes_ , Ky craned his neck to catch a glimpse of Sol's expression, who seemed to have taken no notice of his concern.

"What?" he whispered, tensing for the by now inevitable shove-zip-buckle-swordgrab combo that would send him storming outside and into oncoming mayhem.

"...Just savoring the moment," Sol murmured, leaning forward slightly and allowing him to feel a smirk that had overshot smirk territory and aimed right for self-satisfied cheshire grin.

"...What moment," Ky asked, too relieved to notice the warning signs.

"Oh, come on, Kiske. Do you realize how many people would pay to be in my place right now?"

"No?" Ky said, irritation beginning to creep up on him at the thought of this turning into another one of Sol's stupid jokes about the desirability of his ass.

A huff. "I am making out with you. In a confessional."

"...it's not a confessional," Ky said, still not entirely sure what this had to do with anything.

"Oh, yeah? What'd you call this then, choirboy?" Sol said, rapping his knuckles against the wooden paneling.

"Niche? Alcove? Booth?" Ky ventured, trying to pull away to regain a position that would not direct Sol's arguments towards his crotch.

"If that helps your conscience..." Sol said generously, moving to undo the button on his pants.

"It's not about my conscience," Ky retorted, not sure if he should tackle Sol's state of misinformation or his apparent assumption that he could corrupt Ky into abandoning all rules of propriety in a house of worship first. "This isn't a church. The ground's been desanctified, it's just a building."

"No way."

"No, seriously. It's just a big box."

"Bullshit," Sol said, with feeling. "You don't switch lanes that easily."

"What does it matter what _I_ do," Ky said, sighing. "You've seen the place. It's ramshackle, nobody lives here. It's probably been anything from a way station to a depot before we got here. Our army's turning it into camp, for heaven's sake."

"Yeah, but does God know it's just a building now?"

Taking a breath, Ky tried to remind himself why shocking Sol bald in an ex-confessional with about four hundred men just a wall away would be a bad thing. "Listen. I have _no_ idea what your unfathomable obsession with churches is, and I don't want to know. The point is, this is not a church, so you can stop feeling all smug about it because it's not going to happen."

"What if..." Sol began, a look of contemplation crossing his face. "What if we just add up that one time you kissed me in a church that was definitely still a church—"

"That was a kiss of peace," Ky pointed out, now deeply regretting the seating arrangements that had led to it.

"—and now we're making out—"

"In a building."

"—that used to be a church."

"A building," he insisted. "This does not somehow equal you getting laid in a church."

The bulk of Sol's headband jerked up and down, a sure indication that he was waggling his eyebrows. "I could prove that equation."

With an indistinct noise, Ky slumped in his seat, already resigned to the fact that the mood was irrevocably lost and that Sol would attempt to pursue this nonsensical line of argumentation until he either relented or walked out. Sol, meanwhile, didn't seem to mind sacrificing their scarce amount of alone time to measuring all the sex he could have been having, leaning on one elbow and spider-walking his fingers along Ky's waistband as he tried to come up with a satisfactory solution.

"The way I see it, there's gotta be some things we've done that are at least as bad, so..."

"No."

"I figure getting head in a church would be worth at least, what..."

The button came undone, but at this point, Ky was firmly refusing to assist in fueling Sol's delusions. He didn't budge, and his pants stayed where they were. "No."

"Five times casual sex?" Sol suggested, eyeing the dangling cross necklace meaningfully, as if that could get him a discount.

"That's—"

"Okay, seven."

"Ten."

"Less if we factor kinkiness into it."

"What...?" Ky said, now thoroughly bewildered.

"Well, there was that time you gave me mouth-to-mouth and then we made out for like, half an hour, plus that time I watched you shower, and—"

"This is not an aggregate," Ky said firmly, trying and failing to keep the exasperated growl out of his voice. "There's not some combination of you being a pervert that _equals_ another—"

He paused. Sol had made himself comfortable between his thighs, resting his chin in the palm of one hand and looking up at him expectantly. There was that added gleam in his eyes that he always got right before an argument erupted into a full-blown fight, like he was just waiting for the signal to charge. He looked like someone who very badly wanted to get laid.

"...you're doing this on purpose, aren't you."

All he got in return was that damnable, insolent, know-it-all smirk. "Did anyone ever tell you you're hot when you're pissed?"

There were few moments in Ky's life when he could so clearly foresee the consequences of his actions. Most of the time, reacting wasn't worth it. It was what Sol was hoping for with each offensive statement, each violation of boundaries or rules, and if he reacted to every one of them, he'd have to petition for a forty-eight hour day just to get all the due beatings done. Reacting now could only earn him a spot in Sol's bizarre kink list and a lifetime's worth of gloating. But here he was, with his first free handful of minutes in nearly three weeks, and they were getting spent arguing with an idiot because the idiot thought annoyance was a turn-on.

The spark knocked Sol flat on his ass. And Ky did what shouldn't have been possible in a space the size of a wall closet.

He pounced.


	3. Sol does Ky, Ky does paperwork

In his second year of training, Commander Undersn had transferred him to headquarters' own communication center. Ky didn't understand why at first, one of the few times the Commander had prepared a lesson without first detailing its purpose, couldn't even have said whether the arrangement was a temporary one when he stepped over the threshold, and into a world of silent efficiency.

The center was under the command of a steel-gray lieutenant who directed the radio officers like a general would his troops out in the field. The only noise to be heard was the scratching of pens on paper, even the footsteps swallowed up by the need for silence, the iron-clad rule that nothing was allowed to disrupt the hundred faint, tenuous connections across the ether. No one spoke unless the radio required them to respond, each operator absorbed in the world inside their headphones.

His stay lasted four weeks. Four weeks in which the lieutenant had him doing transcriptions while listening on the close-range radio, and updating maps with his other hand. Four weeks in which she would descend on him without warning, order him to recite a list of coordinates or triangulate a point of reference in his head, without ever ceasing in his transcriptions.

It was there that he learned, with his mind filled to the brim with information, what would be expected of him as a future Candidate, every day and every hour of the day, for as long as there was breath in him to do his duty. When he told that to the lieutenant, she wrote up a note shuffling him back into the Commander's care, and handed it to him with her first and only smile.

In a way, this was a situation exactly like any other for which his training had prepared him, and yet, he couldn't shake the feeling that the lieutenant hadn't been thinking of this when she'd taught him the value of multitasking.

"You're in the way."

The herculean task currently enamored with his jawline made a noncommittal noise, and decided that the side of his throat really wasn't that bad of a compromise. Taking a moment to adjust to the faint tickle of lips feeling around for his pulse point, Ky reached up to card a hand through Sol's hair, as much to return the gesture as to brush the unruly mop out of his line of vision. All of this really would have been easier if Sol hadn't decided on a frontal assault.

"Try not to leave anything too obvious. There are only so many times I can cite a Gear attack as an excuse."

A snort, followed by teeth skimming along the tendons in his neck in silent provocation.

"I can still shock you in the mouth," Ky said idly, shifting towards the edge of his seat to find an angle that wouldn't end with the weapons requisition list slanting diagonally across the page.

"Mhmm," came the reply from somewhere close to his clavicle, Sol either entirely too pleased or entirely unconcerned with the threat. Possibly both.

Deciding to let it slide, Ky returned his attention to the form. He couldn't expect Sol to stay in non-critical territory for very long, concerned as he was with getting in the maximum amount of groping in the minimum amount of time, but he could at least try to advance to the grenade shipments in the five minutes it took for Sol to start getting bored with teasing out a bruise in a semi-discreet location. Negotiable damage in exchange for unstained paperwork, and if he really hadn't been able to afford the distraction, he would have stopped the festivities before they even began.

Perhaps he ought to put his foot down more often on principle, Ky thought as he lifted the sheet to check the carbon, just to avoid being thought of as too compliant. This was Sol pushing the envelope, fully aware whenever Ky's "not now" carried a vibe of "convince me." At least the unstable nature of the folding desk had moved the semantic argument from what constituted "on the desk" to "involving the desk," Sol managing to wedge himself in the space between the edge of the top and Ky's chair, all the while feeling unduly smug about his feat.

Ky's pen found the signature line blind, completing the last flourish without the hint of a wobble despite the insistent tugging at his collar. The heavens only knew what possessed Sol to try and undo zippers with his mouth when he had a perfectly serviceable pair of hands. He'd had it explained to him, of course, alongside the mystery of why ruined uniforms were hot and why he should really keep his boots on when the rest of him was naked, but that didn't mean it made any more sense afterwards.

"For the sake of brevity, let's say I see how this is sexy but that I'd thank you to leave my shirt intact," Ky murmured, one hand reaching for the sealing wax while the other sought to nudge Sol away, only to find his fingers subject to some attention of their own. He couldn't quite help the hitch of breath, the rough swipe of tongue against his fingertips an unexpected move even if the message wasn't, and felt Sol grin against his knuckles.

"I still have to make a speech in this tomorrow."

The zipper became unstuck, and he left it to Sol to do what he would, instead dribbling a bit of the wax in a corner of the form and pressing his seal down.

"Don't need a shirt to make speeches," Sol said, the "don't need pants, either" portion getting lost when he chose to nip an outline around the crucifix resting in the center of Ky's chest.

"I'm sure the archbishop has a somewhat divergent view on the matter," Ky said, shifting a little to see how far he could reach without either toppling the precarious arrangement or accidentally kneeing Sol in the stomach. "Speaking of which, grab that stack over on the left for me. I still need to finish the laudation."

Sol's answering grumble told him exactly where in his esteemed opinion the laudation could go, but he eventually complied, the papers spilling across the surface in a less than graceful maneuver.

"Don't tip my ink well," Ky warned, setting about piecing the speech back together. "And no grinding, please, you're jostling the desk."

"Why is this so hot?"

"You're asking me." Ky dipped his pen again, sliding one leg over Sol's shoulder to accommodate his steady downward path and still keep the writing legible. "I can't balance like that. Put your hand on my waist. Lower."

"...Yessir."

Blinking, Ky risked a glance to where Sol was currently enamored with the pale curve of the scar above his hip, just to make sure he'd heard right, the tone entirely devoid of sarcasm. He could count the amount of times Sol had acknowledged his rank on the fingers of one hand, never without irony and never like this.

"For the record, that's pretty disturbing."

A warm puff of breath as Sol huffed out a laugh. "It's pretty sexy, finally getting bossed around by you in bed."

"We're not even in bed," Ky pointed out, sure he would have felt more concerned about being rude if he weren't currently in the process of formulating an address to a hundred high-ranking officials. "And it's weird to get respect from you when I'm ignoring you."

"That's what makes it hot," Sol said as if it were all self-evident, preoccupied with opening the latches on his belt.

"You think it's hot when I treat you like an object," Ky said flatly. "And focus entirely on myself. Unlike, say, everyone else on Earth."

"Are you being judgmental?"

"I—"

"...hot."

Out of options for a dignified reply, Ky settled for glaring at the top of Sol's head, in the vain hope of osmosing his annoyance straight into his skull. One of the things that made Sol's points so obnoxious was that it was impossible to tell when he was serious and when he was just yanking his chain, sharing the most nonsensical thing he could think of solely to throw him off his game. It would be better, he supposed, if he could at least detect the logic in Sol's less outlandish kinks, the kinds he seemed to share with most of the rest of camp. He hated feeling like there was something wrong with him.

The desk rattled, Sol sliding up in the space between to watch him with a contemplative expression on his face.

Ky sighed. "What is it now."

A grin. "Nothing. Just making a deposit in the spank bank."

"The what?"

The words were out before he could hold them back, his own curiosity over the nonsense words peppering Sol's speech overriding the realization that he'd just asked for the definition to something undoubtedly perverted.

"You're busy, you're demanding, you're annoyed. It's like Fort Knox."

Ky stared, exasperation warring with confusion at the joke that was obviously at his expense, though he'd be damned if he knew what kind of fort Sol was talking about.

"I can't talk with your tongue in my mouth." Sol's eyes were gleaming with a positively wolfish light. "Just a suggestion."

"Je connais pas plus casse-pieds que toi," Ky sighed, and bent down to stifle the inevitable, insufferable, "..hot."


	4. In which Ky's pragmatism meets old-world pornography (sort of)

If there ever was a man who had made an art out of saying both everything and nothing in the space of five words or less, it was Sol Badguy. 

Part of that could certainly be attributed to the circumstances, as a war offered entirely too many situations in which, "Fuck," was the only accurate assessment to be made. The other part was that Sol was naturally disinclined to exercise his vocal chords, preferring to rely on a combination of rude gestures and guttural noises to get his points across. Since people, for the most part, were naturally disinclined to stay in the company of three-hundred pounds of angry-looking fire user any longer than they strictly had to, most never acquired the degree of fluency in swearing and offensive body language necessary to realize that Sol was able to give even a grunt a surprising amount of depth. 

Ky had stuck around. 

After many years of whisper-shouting orders, arguments and the occasional, "You know what I'm wearing, it's the same thing I wear everyday, as do you, as does the rest of the army, now get off the emergency channel, please and thank you," across various battlefields, he'd become fairly good at guessing the course a conversation would take purely from the intonation of the first word out of Sol's mouth. In fact, Ky might have considered his degree of accuracy a little embarrassing if it hadn't so often spared him either a massive crater, a massive migraine, or both.

So when Sol called, "C'mere a sec," his compliance came wrapped in about sixty percent guarded curiosity and forty percent pure indulgence. 

Abandoning his perusal of a shelf of half-disintegrated books, Ky craned his neck to figure out where Sol had gone off to. He'd last seen him sorting through crates of blacktech at the far end of the storage chamber, though that had been some time ago, before Ky had become absorbed in deciphering the subjects that had commandeered the interest of people during the Lost Age. (To be fair, the title "The World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais" alone raised so many questions). 

"Yes?" 

The question was purely perfunctory; there was no mistaking the slight drawl in Sol's voice, lowering it from his usual pitch. With anyone else, Ky could have dismissed it as a quirk of speaking in a cavernous space, but with Sol, it meant he was plotting, and the only times Sol was plotting was when he was trying to turn Ky into a one-person social experiment. And depending on his mood, that could either be a genuinely interesting object lesson, or—

"Take a look at this."

Okay, the last time Sol had sounded so deliberately casual, he'd turned the Furaiken into something that was blunt, purple, and vibrated, so this was clearly going to be a social experiment on Ky's blood pressure instead. 

The best course of action would have been to ignore Sol, grab his sword and spend the next hour walking around with his shields up to avoid falling victim to one of Sol's juvenile pranks. After all, this was the man who hadn't let the alpine tundra deter him from dyeing Ky's entire supply of clean uniforms a truly vibrant shade of pink. However, a side effect of spending so much time on deciphering Sol's intentions was learning how rarely Sol's humor wasn't tangled up in ruefulness and cynicism, and the past couple of weeks of chasing PWAB leads hadn't exactly afforded a lot of opportunities to brighten the mood.

Shaking his head at himself, Ky grabbed the Furaiken, wove a shield spell, and set off into the second tunnel to the left. 

* * *

In comparison to the floor-to-ceiling chaos of the main storage area, the corridor proved to be rather empty save for a barred iron gate (now unhinged, likely courtesy of Sol) and a bunch of heavy drapes, their once-scarlet hue faded to a dull brown. A strange place to put decorations, but then again, whoever had built this bunker had also thought treatises on fromage frais worth preserving for the ages. Whatever Sol had dug up in its recesses was sure to cost him his dignity, and a slice of sanity, to boot. 

Past a moldy carpet, an impressive but thoroughly spoiled wine collection and another banged up iron gate, the tunnel opened up into a stone-walled room with a high ceiling, smaller than the storage area but still big enough to house several pieces of furniture. Sol was leaning against a long wooden table, digging through a ratty cardboard box. He looked up when Ky stepped across the threshold, lips twitching into a smirk when he caught wind of the shield spell.

Ky raised an eyebrow, and, when Sol failed to set off a complicated booby trap, slowly let the spell thin and disperse. "So, what did you want me to see?"

Sol gave him a long look, but finally settled for gesturing at the room at large. "Look what I found."

Dutifully, Ky looked. 

It wasn't like he had expected a straightforward answer, and he'd been much too focused on possible pranks to do more than check for exits and buckets of who-knew-what over the door. The ancient lighting in this part of the bunker had been confined to decorative candelabra, their dim light giving the place a gloomy air more reminiscent of a crypt or a vault than a bunker designed to shelter people from the Gears. 

That seemed a little peculiar, if not particularly interesting. 

He shot Sol a sidelong glance, who shot a sidelong glance right back, eyes gleaming with a kind of mirth that had become rare as of late. 

Whatever benightedness he was meant to discover, it would cost him more than a couple of brain cells that could have been expended on useful things, like finding clues or salvageable materials. 

Ah, well. Noble sacrifice, that was what it was. 

Upon closer inspection, the ambience of the room wasn't the only peculiar thing about it. The furniture, too, was deliberately crude, metal coffers and a high-backed wooden armchair that seemed more like something that ought to adorn an Inquisitorial interrogation chamber than an everyday living space. Even the table Sol was propped didn't seem intended for work or dining, its surface slanted at an angle and some kind of winch-like mechanism near its head allowing it to be lowered and tilted at will. 

To one side stood a featureless carving of a wooden horse, though its sharply ridged back reminded Ky more of some kind of mechanical device than an actual statue. Riding implements had been scattered over and around it rather carelessly, though even a casual once-over revealed that the craftsman had been no equestrian. Apart from an excessive amount of crops in different shapes and sizes, the bridle and saddle were much too narrow to fit an actual animal, and whoever had designed the riding boots had clearly never thought of the possibility that the rider might need to extract their legs from the stirrups at a moment's notice — the stiff, tight fit and absurdly high heels were a pair of shattered ankles just waiting to happen. 

What was more worrisome than the poor quality of the horse gear, however, were the things lurking in the dim recesses of the walls. At first, Ky had dismissed the various flails, pokers, and bulb-shaped objects as tools and containers, but now that he was paying close attention to their make, it became clear that these couldn't be used as farming equipment. Too soft or brittle, too unwieldy, too adorned with unnecessary spikes… and then, of course, there were the chains, enough to secure and hoist a standard-issue magic cannon — some thin and nearly decorative, others with links the size of a human hand, wound up in thick coils. Some were even hanging from the ceiling, swaying and clinking faintly in the draft. 

Ky frowned. 

From the looks of it, whoever had built the place had anticipated a fair amount of misconduct among the bunkers' inhabitants-to-be, and also subscribed to a brand of torture that would have won them the eternal admiration of the Holy Roman Inquisition.

"Well, what do you think?" Sol said, still sounding pleased with himself despite the grim purpose of his discovery.

"I think," Ky said slowly, feeling like there was something he was supposed to get and failing, "that the ideas of the Inquisition appear to predate the Inquisition." 

Sol blinked at him in a way that said this was one response he hadn't anticipated.

"What?" Ky asked, confusion winning out against his better judgment, which was telling him to just let Sol be the only one in the know.

"Guess they don't cover this kind of thing in Sunday school, huh."

The insinuation was as old as dirt, or at least as old as their first meeting, when Sol had taken every opportunity to needle him about any and all aspects of himself. For one reason another, he'd never felt the need to retire this particular jab, despite some of the decidedly un-Catholic things they'd done in the years since. After all this time, Ky had become very good at not dignifying it with an answer. "I'm sure I could agree or disagree more efficiently if I knew what on Earth you are talking about." 

"It's a sex dungeon, Kiske," Sol said with the air of someone who was being forced to explain an obvious joke and was starting to find it not funny himself. "Somebody was planning on boning their way through the apocalypse. Vigorously."

Maybe, just maybe, Ky would have felt some vestiges of embarrassment at intruding on somebody's privacy like that if the very idea hadn't sounded bizarre. "I'm going to regret asking, but what about this—" he waved at one of the torture racks, "—allows you to come to that conclusion?"

If he hadn't known better, the expression on Sol's face was starting to resemble a pout. "S&M, Kiske. Seriously, your country invented the whole thing."

Giving him a dubious look, Ky sifted through his memory in search of the term, chasing down half-forgotten watchfire conversations he'd overheard on some quiet night or another, soldiers regaling squad mates with their conquests for lack of anything else to do.

"Ah. So that's what… wow. Alright. People in the past really did have lots of time." 

"Penny dropped?" Sol asked. Sometime during Ky's exploration of his mental dictionary, he had walked over to the chests against the far wall and was rummaging through them, their contents squeaking and rustling suspiciously. 

"I suppose…" Ky said, still not entirely sure what to make of this revelation. "Is there a reason you wanted me to see this? Because, well, to be perfectly honest... I don't think I want to go to all this trouble."

To his surprise, Sol got a breath stuck in his windpipe and doubled over coughing. "Oh man. Oh man, you think I was—"

"Well, given that I can't even fathom the things you want me to be embarrassed about, I assumed that was your intention." Ky hummed contemplatively. "Anyway, this seems like a lot of effort just to get the job done." 

Sol made another wheezing sound that Ky was starting to recognize as barely repressed laughter, and thumped his fist against his thigh. 

Ky wrinkled his nose and let his gaze sweep around the room again, trying to cast all the instruments of torture as accessories in acts that, to him, seemed to have very little to do with sex. "…I can't imagine hanging upside down to be very comfortable."

"That's kind of the point," Sol started to say, but by then Ky was making an earnest attempt to understand the issue. 

"I mean, I've done it," he mused. "Not while doing _that_ , obviously. But I imagine dangling wrong side up from a Gear's jaws to be slightly more rigorous."

"You're pretty hot when you're all judgmental, anyone ever tell you that?"

Sol had, on more than one occasion, and it still made as much sense as the first time, which was exactly none. 

Ky would have spared him an eye-roll if he hadn't been so preoccupied with trying to imagine in what world all the pain those devices could inflict might be considered stimulating. During the war, he'd done the lacerated back and the bruised ribs routine on a nearly weekly basis, and each time had failed to instill in him the desire to try again. And no matter how depraved Sol was pretending to be, he didn't seem to find Ky's black-and-blue inkblot tests to be much of a turn-on, either.

"I'm not judging," Ky said, without heat, stepping closer to inspect one of the alcoves, which turned out to be a makeshift wardrobe. 

Perhaps looking through a closet was rude to whoever had deemed these clothes important enough to survive the war, but Ky firmly believed in investigative empiricism for things he didn't understand. 

The passage of time hadn't been kind to the garments stored behind the flimsy curtain, lacquer cracking and flaking off, seams of sequins and imitation chain mail unraveling to the floor. Bemused, Ky singled out a kind of corset made entirely of belts, the oversized buckles corroded so much that a casual touch would have caused them to crumble. The belts themselves were studded with tiny metal spikes that came off when he brushed his fingers over them, the glue brittle with age.

Something about the gaudy non-practicality of the outfit brought to mind the Order dress uniform, and the many official functions he had spent wearing it — the ridiculously high collar hugging his neck in a vise-like grip, the thigh-length lace-up boots that always took half an hour to get on and off, and would barely allow him to move faster than a leisurely stroll. Apart from his personal discomfort, though, the uniform had made him nervous, the way it restricted all natural movement, forced him to compensate, to shift his stance and abandon all hope for quick and fluid swordplay in case of a surprise attack. 

Trying to apply what was basically the closest thing to a full-body tourniquet to bedroom fun just seemed counterproductive. Which, according to Sol, was the point he was failing to get. 

Shaking his head, he moved back. "I don't get it. This doesn't make any sense."

"It's porn, Kiske. We've had that discussion before." Sol briefly turned away from his rummaging to lift two fingers and wag them at each other. "Porn. Not a math problem."

"Why would that exempt it from making sense?"

"Making sense is kind of… optional. People don't usually read Best of Tentacle Hentai Deluxe Volume Five for sense."

"Best of what?"

Sol held up a frayed magazine, its cover faded to a silhouette that seemed to depict some kind of writhing abyssal hellspawn of a Gear doing something to a flesh-colored blob that might have been a nude person a good two-hundred years ago. 

Ky pointedly redirected his bafflement at the equally puzzling but infinitely less faux-pas-inducing rack of clothing. "That's just so many kinds of bizarre and impossible I don't even know where to start."

Behind him, Sol huffed in what sounded like partial exasperation and amusement. "'s not like you can still see anything." The ancient magazine rustled. "Oh hey, I think that might be a boob."

"That's nice?" Ky said, doing his best to wrap his mind around the fact that there evidently was a market for these things, or at least, there had been a market once upon a time, when people had been under a grave misapprehension concerning what Gears generally liked to do to humans, naked or clothed. Which… alright, perhaps he _was_ being a little judgmental here, but that was only because he'd met his fair share of tentacled nightmares on the battlefield, and the _last_ thing anyone in their right mind should want was to meet the business end of their suckers. Their razor-bladed, man-sized, face-shredding suckers. 

Something must have shown in his expression, because Sol gave a thoughtful "hm" and started digging through the boxes again. "Alright, maybe that wasn't the best example. Most of this stuff used to mean something a bit different. Probably should've started you off on the repairman porn or something, let's see…"

"…I take it that in this strangely specific sub-genre of things that make no sense, the Gears are replaced by household appliances?"

"…you have a surprisingly dirty mind, Kiske, but no. It's just the setup."

"I was only trying to extrapolate," Ky said. "And besides, why would it have a setup? I thought you said these things were specifically engineered to make no sense whatsoever?"

"Well, you gotta have some context," Sol said, waving a hand to illustrate precisely nothing. "It's part of the kink."

"Which is… repairs?"

"No. It's usually just… repair dude shows up at some place for work, girl greets him in a negligé or something, and the fun proceeds from there."

"Well, that's wildly irresponsible. Does he at least fix the thing he was called for?"

Sol rolled his eyes. "Not the point. Not the point in the slightest."

"So there was no reason to introduce this plot element in the first place."

Huffing out a laugh, Sol dropped whatever he'd been looking for, kicking the chest closed. "Guess not. C'mon, let's head back before your porn meta retroactively erases every boner I've ever had."

"Given how you're so apt at making no sense, I have complete faith that you'll come up with an appropriate replacement. Or inappropriate, as it were," Ky said drily, drawing the closet shut and following after him. 

* * *

They returned to the main storage area in silence, splitting up once again to resume their self-appointed tasks of Sol shoving gutted blacktech parts into his duffel bag and Ky skimming the rows of poorly preserved books for anything salvage- or readable. His mind wasn't on it, though, still preoccupied with the conversation. Of course, Sol had only been trying to get a rise out of him, perhaps hoping for an embarrassed rant of some kind and completely forgetting that Ky had difficulty seeing what all the fuss was about in the first place. 

Which, of course, was the crux of the problem. 

Usually, Ky was able to chalk up his superb lack of imagination to the fact that he had more important things on his plate than his own pleasure, or that, in his opinion, location still trumped mechanics by a mile and a half. A bed with freshly washed sheets and an actual mattress that he slept in while not injured and didn't have to roll up and carry a hundred miles was still one of the most blissful things he could think of. Everything else was just a bonus. Sol tended to pick up his slack in the imagination department, at any rate, but it was times like this that Ky actually began to wonder. 

Normal people, he was pretty sure, would have taken a look at the dungeon and felt either mortified or inspired, instead of getting stuck puzzling out what could possibly be considered attractive about Gears or people repairing things. 

He chanced a glance over his shoulder to where Sol had settled cross-legged on the floor, grumbling every now and then when a piece of blacktech proved particularly obstinate.

Hm.

Mostly everybody else, it seemed, didn't think about it and just went with the flow. And while Ky was good at going with the flow when it came to the important things, an appreciation of erotica was nowhere near the realms of "people are dying right now so fix it" and "people will be dying pretty soon so keep it from happening." It shouldn't matter, he knew, and in the grand scheme of things it didn't, yet he couldn't help feeling like his teenaged self had skipped a step in the assembly process of maturity somewhere, leaving his current self to bang two parts together that wouldn't connect.

"You really don't get it, do you."

Sol had stopped packing up and was watching him, an undercurrent of amused curiosity in his voice. Ky chose to accept it as the peace offering it was, even though he'd only been a little annoyed with himself. He replaced the tome he'd been holding ("A History of Abandoned Shopping Carts in Eastern North America," another bizarre and alien topic, go figure) and shook his head, smiling wryly. "Not really, no. I told you, out of uniform I'm spectacularly boring."

The limiter made a meaningful lurch towards Sol's hairline.

"Oh, you know what I mean."

Sol rolled his shoulders in a "maybe, maybe not" gesture and said, "Well, if it bothers you that much, we can make a pitstop in the next town. Rennes? Rouen? Anyway, we could get you started with a pack of sexy poker cards or whatever and see what happens. I think there's even an underground guy version around now, so you've got options."

Ky scrunched up his eyebrows, fishing for a faint recollection — off-duty soldiers hunched across a table in the mess tent and playing for a pile of small change, salacious grins dying down once they realized the presence of the High Commander, who'd really just wanted to grab dinner and be on his way for a tryst with the paperwork. "Oh, those. I did have one of those in my possession for a while."

He didn't say _and I couldn't see what the fuss was all about with that, either_ but it came across anyway. 

Sol was giving him a look that, on any other person, could have been described as scandalized. " _You_?"

"Hm?"

"You, Sir Stickass, owning instruments of sin and depravity?"

Ky rolled his eyes, hard. "If you want to classify aesthetic nudes as sinful… Anyway—"

"No, no, hold up," Sol said, rising to his feet. "First the kitchen tools comment, now the sexy cards? I'm seeing an all new side of you here. Details, now."

Ky shrugged. "It was an accident, more or less."

"Uh-huh."

"One of the inquisitorial inspectors took them off one of my men and… deposited them with me, along with a lengthy list of all the grievous violations of good Christian morals in my battalion."

"Uh-huh."

"I tried to return the cards once he left, but no one knew who they belonged to." 

Sol made a derisive noise. "Can't imagine why." 

"It's not like I would have faulted them for it," Ky sighed, lips quirking ruefully, "even if I had the time or energy to do so." 

Sol didn't really bother acknowledging the statement. "So what did you do with them, anyway?"

"They probably got lost or destroyed along with one of my various desks somewhere along the line. I don't know, I forgot about them after a while. Maybe they got sent back to the requisition office and somebody else is now putting them to their intended use." 

"Not what I meant."

Ky blinked.

"Come on. You can't tell me you didn't at least _look_ … oh who am I kidding, of course you didn't." 

"Naturally. Even if I'd felt like it, which I didn't, it would've been rude to just go ahead and stare without permission."

Sol was looking at him as if he'd grown another head. "Only you would be able to worry about the emotional health of a sexy card."

"Somebody had to model for those cards." 

"You do realize that those models wanted you to stare when they posed like that. Probably you specifically."

"I doubt it."

Sol held up his hands in mock surrender. "Suit yourself. The Kiske Wank Bank is still a fully bonded global authority."

"Let's pretend I know what that means, the fact of the matter is it would have been rude." Biting his lip, Ky paused. "And at the end of the day, it would still be a picture of a stranger. I'm not sure what's supposed to be so enticing about looking at somebody you don't even know." 

"So it'd be okay if it's somebody you _do_ know?" 

"In that case, I don't see why I'd need a picture for it," Ky said. "Seeing how you so rarely wear a shirt. Or pants."

Sol was grinning as if he'd just revealed a juicy secret instead of a perfectly obvious fact. "Flattering as that is — and I will be getting back to you on that — that's hardly a _fantasy_."

"Oh, right, it's supposed to be illogical and highly improbable. Alright, you, without a shirt, being infallibly polite and temperate for twenty-four hours."

"Hah! That's not improbable, that's impossible. Next."

"I'm sorry," Ky conceded. "That was the best I had."

Sol smacked his face into his palm, which lost some of its dramatic effect on account of the limiter getting in the way. "Where, oh where, did I go wrong?"

Ky gave a noncommittal hum, resisting the urge to point out that he'd informed Sol of his limited entertainment value way back when they had first started out. For one, that had been a long time ago, and for another, there was no way, after all the back-and-forth about his lack of imagination, that it wouldn't come out sounding petty. It wasn't like he was genuinely worried about his lack of sexual imagination, after all, more baffled and a little curious as to the reasons, if there were any at all. 

The sounds of more shoving and zipping kept him from wandering off in his own head. Sol had shouldered the bulging duffel and retrieved the Fuenken from where it had been propping against a mound of discarded mechanical husks. "Well, whatever. I'm done here, so let's blow this joint. And since this is a day trip, who knows. We might just find you a fantasy on the way back."

"I'm afraid to ask how you're intending to do that," Ky said, only half seriously, allowing himself to be steered towards the exit and into the bright, warm outdoors. 

Sol pulled the door closed behind them, its steel frame starting to glow red as it melted shut. 

"Well." A kick put a sizable dent into the door and startled a flock of thrushes from the underbrush, but it remained stuck. "For starters, I'm granting you full ogling rights, which, by the way, are totally a thing. And then, we're gonna do a bit of empirical research with those oh-so-unlikely scenarios, starring yours truly."

"I don't believe this is going to—"

Waving off his protest, Sol started off in the general direction of the town. "First one. Plumber."

Ky blinked, and decided it was probably against the rules to point out that neither of them currently owned a house. "…No."

"Mailman."

It was probably also against the rules to mention that Sol had, on more than one occasion, set his paperwork on fire. "No."

"Cable guy."

"...What's that?"

Sol scowled into the middle distance. "Bad example, forget about it. Um, let's see. Butler."

"No."

"Teacher."

" _No._ "

"Birthday cake stripper."

Ky made a face. "Please don't retroactively ruin every cake I've ever had."

"OI!"

The genuine look of affront on Sol's face made it really hard not to break into a fit of giggles. "Actually, I can think of a fantasy."

"Oh yeah?"

At some point, he was going to have to think more about how this immediately put a stop to all the huffing and playing around, effortlessly netting him Sol's full attention. There might be a way to exploit it for some greater good, like delicate diplomatic maneuvers that hinged on Sol shutting up and not greeting anybody with an up-yours. Then again, mixing diplomacy with such smoldering looks as Sol was currently giving him was probably a bad idea.

"Yes. Red velvet strawberry shortcake," Ky said, unable to keep his voice from taking on a dreamy note at the thought of such a treat. "There's this patisserie in Rouen—"

Sol deflated. "That's… not a fantasy. That's just your war trauma."

"I don't have a war trauma," Ky said, "and you didn't let me finish. That patisserie sells the shortcakes in little boxes, so we could just grab one, find a quiet place, and I'd hand you the fork."

"Wait. Wait. Your fantasy is me feeding you pastry? Whipped cream debauchery and all?"

"No, that's your fantasy. But I wouldn't mind acting it out."

Sol gave him a sidelong glance. "Because cake, right?"

Well, at least this flirting thing was getting easier. 

"Because cake."


End file.
